


Clap Your Hands If You Believe

by wizened_cynic



Series: Dress Your Family in Kevlar and Armani [7]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Angst and Humor, Angsty Schmoop, F/M, Impregnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 22:10:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wizened_cynic/pseuds/wizened_cynic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are just humans trying to do a human thing and it's not working.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clap Your Hands If You Believe

**Author's Note:**

> In which I attempt to write angst.

Emily's period starts on a Wednesday.

Somehow --- and she's almost embarrassed to admit this --- it still catches her by surprise after all these years. This time it's either two weeks early or three weeks late. She can't tell anymore, not since going off the pill has completely screwed with her cycle.

The bright shock of red against the white of her underwear makes her raise her fist to her teeth. There's so much of it, so much of her blood, that it can't be right, and she thinks, _I'm wounded._

It takes her a minute, but she gets herself together. She's got clean underwear in her go bag and a tampon in her purse. In less than five minutes, she's back in the roundtable room where JJ is briefing them on a series of child abductions in Minneapolis like nothing's happened. Another ordinary day in her ordinary life. Nothing's different. She's still not pregnant.

She knows Dave is watching from across the table, and she keeps her eyes on the notepad in front of her, as if avoiding his gaze could stop him from knowing what he already knew. She doesn't want to see his disappointment any more than she wants him to see hers. She doesn't want to see that look that says, _It's all right. We'll try again,_ because trying is not the problem here. Trying and failing --- _that_ is the problem, and they've tried and failed for seven months already, seven times Emily has stared at her underwear and thought, _I'm wounded I'm wounded I'm wounded_.

They've tried everything.

They've fucked in every single position known to help achieve conception, to the point where her OBGYN even commented, once, "It's like Green Eggs and Ham, but with sex," which made Emily laugh because the alternative was to cry. Yes, they've done it in the missionary position and they've done it on all fours. They've done it on the floor and in hotel beds and, once, pressed up against the wall of the handicapped bathroom of a police station in Lawrence, Kansas, because it just happened to be those precious few hours when Emily was ovulating and they couldn't afford to miss that window of opportunity.

She's taking folic acid and he's cutting down on caffeine, and together they've wished on candles, wished on eyelashes, wished on dandelions. They've prayed to their god and any others who might be listening. She takes her temperature every morning and she's peed on more sticks than she could count, and sometimes she thinks that Dave is too good for her, because he doesn't even flinch anymore when they talk about shit like cervical mucus and progesterone levels.

He was hesitant at first, but he was pretty much on board with starting a family once they both discovered that the idea of fucking with intent, fucking to make a baby, to create life together, is something that really, really turns Dave on.

"Gonna put my baby in you," he used to whisper to her in a tone hoarse with desperation, and she would clench around him, trying to pull him in deeper, as if they could disappear within each other completely, "Gonna come inside you and and knock you up, and people are gonna see you and know that I fucked you, fucked you until I got you pregnant, fucked you until I made you mine." His words went straight to her clit and made her come almost instantly, her hands making fists against the sheets or the back of his shirt and her entire world flashing white before her, making her dizzy with hope.

They're quiet now when they fuck. Quiet, too, afterwards. Sometimes she can't even stand to look at him and she can feel his hurt, his worry that it's his fault somehow, when it's not. It's hers, she knows, and the knowledge makes her sob into her hand which he takes into his, pressing their fingers together because palm to palm is how holy palmers kiss.

But they are not holy.

They are just humans trying to do a human thing and it's not working, and now JJ is calling her name.

"Emily? You all right?"

This time Emily can't look down and she sees the way Dave looks at her.

"I'm fine," she answers. She wonders if she's fooling anybody here.

*

They should probably see a reproductive specialist.

They probably should have done it at the very beginning, but they were too arrogant and too stupid and maybe too naive to think that their love alone would be enough to bring a child into the world.

Dave has done the necessary research on it. Emily knows, because she uses his computer when she stays over and they've bookmarked the same websites. Garcia would be appalled by how bad they are at hiding their tracks, if she knew what they're trying to do. (Emily suspect she does. She knows for sure that the clerk at the nearby CVS most definitely does.)

They teach themselves the side effects of Clomid and the success rates of IVF, which, frankly, suck for people their age. Their odds are crap but even though Emily considers herself to be smart about gambling, always knowing when to step away, she can't bring herself to fold on this one.

Emily has read about this one procedure where the doctor injects dye into a woman's uterus to check for scars and defects, reasons why a child won't take hold. The whole process resembles the kind of torture their UNSUBS routinely inflict on their victims, and it never fails to remind her of the time Reid began spouting about the etymology of the word "hysteria" at a Denny's somewhere in the backwoods of Wyoming. "It comes from Greek, meaning 'suffering of the womb,'" he said brightly over scrambled eggs and hashbrowns, and Rossi almost murdered him with a bottle of maple syrup.

She knows there are no miracles --- even if there were, she didn't think she was worthy of one --- and eventually one of them will say to the other, _It's not working_.

Until then, she lies on her side and lets him fuck her quietly from behind, one arm thrown around her body almost protectively. When he comes he groans into the spot between her shoulder blades and she can feel the warm wet of his tears.

 

*

"We don't have to do this, you know," Emily says one night. She's got a pillow tucked underneath her hips. She's glad the lights are off because she is in a ridiculous position and if she saw herself in the mirror, she might have to laugh at herself for being hopeful enough to believe that it just might happen, this time. "You never really wanted to have kids anyway."

He looks at her as if he's been slapped.

"No - what I meant was -" She didn't mean to insinuate that they weren't pregnant because Dave doesn't want it enough, but the words are out, hovering above them like tiny invisible blades, and she can't take them back.

Dave is silent for a long time. Finally he says, more incredulous than angry, "You've got to be fucking kidding me if you actually think I don't want this as much as you do."

Emily opens her mouth to speak, but he doesn't let her. "Or that I want it for the wrong reason, to make you happy or something. Because I can tell you, I want this damn kid more than anything in my life, except for maybe you."

He gets out of bed and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. Emily wants to go after him, but she's not supposed to get up for at least another fifteen minutes. Somehow she's become the asshole in this relationship, and not even the lovable kind that Dave tends to be from time to time.

He doesn't speak to her for two whole days.

*

"I know," Emily says. They're flushed with sweat and she's _this_ close to coming, and when he pulls back a little in surprise, she rakes her fingers through his hair and draws him into a deep, desperate kiss like she's trying to breathe him into her. They're not holy because they're human and this is how humans kiss, not palm to palm but tongue and lips and teeth and she spreads her legs so he can drive in deeper, stretch her until it hurts a good kind of hurt.

She knows he's tired of having sex as a means to an end, and she is too, but she presses on because she can't _not_ and so does he, for the same reason.

She may not be worthy of miracles, but when she looks at Dave sometimes, she knows she is living one.

*

In Okinawa, an 85-year-old woman presses into Emily's hand a _jizo_ whittled out of pine and whispers to her in a language Emily doesn't understand.

They are in Japan to interview a teenager suspected of raping and strangling a little girl. His father is an air force pilot and the FBI has extraterritorial jurisdiction, which does not endear them to the locals but the Japanese are too polite, too hospitable, to show their contempt.

Hotch would've sent Reid, but Emily has no doubt that Hotch knows about them even more than the CVS clerk does and he tells her to go with Dave instead. They end up having weird, awkward sex, for fear of having to clean semen off the tatami, which neither of them think is entirely possible, and they laugh their way through most of it.

(It's the father. If the boy hadn't broken ten hours in, his father would've let him take the fall for it.)

At the airport, over burgers that are maybe half the size of those you would find at a regular, all-American diner, Dave asks Emily, "What did she say to you?"

She's fluent in Arabic and French and her Russian is passable, but she has to rely on the translator for this one, a Hawaiian-born rookie fresh out of the academy.

This is what Mrs. Yamamoto said: _For your past and for your future_.

*

When it finally happens, there is no fanfare. No confetti, no skywriting, no archangel appearing at the foot of their bed announcing, "Be not afraid. You guys win. Here you go."

There is only jetlag that won't go away for weeks and a dental checkup that has been postponed four times in the last six months. Her dental hygienist is a no-nonsense woman named Anna who smells like latex and bubblegum. When she tells Emily to open wide, Emily has the urge to confess that she's not as diligent about flossing as she pretends to be.

Anna makes an expression that fills Emily with shame. "You grind your teeth," she says, the soft lilt of her voice working no wonders at concealing her dismay. "You should look into getting a nightguard fitted. You have the teeth of a sixty-year-old woman."

Emily just nods and swallows, remembering exactly why she put off her six-month checkup for a year and a half. She disappoints Anna further by having a cavity in one of her back molars. "You don't need a filling at this stage. I'll give you some toothpaste to remineralize the enamel, but you need to cut down on the stress and sugar."

When Anna steps away to scribble something on Emily's chart, Emily whips out her phone and sends a frantic text to Dave: _When I come back, I'm going to tell you in detail how much I hate the dentist and then we can have sex_ , to which Dave replies, _Worst foreplay ever. Looking forward._

"Now, Emily," Anna says, sounding remarkably like the Ambassador, "we're going to do some x-rays. Is there any chance you might be pregnant?"

"Probably not," Emily says without thinking.

Her dental hygienist is not satisfied with that answer. "That's not good enough. We've got to be sure. When was your last period?"

Emily starts counting backwards, trying to figure out the dates, but Anna doesn't have all day. "How about this? I'll finish cleaning your teeth, and while I'm taking care of my next patient, you go to the drugstore next door and figure out whether or not you're pregnant, okay?"

This is why she hates going to the dentist.

The dates don't add up, but then again her dates have never made any sense. Still, her hand trembles with fear and hope as she waits in line at the cash register. "Do you need a bag?" the cashier asks, and Emily just shakes her head and asks where the bathroom is.

By now she can practically give seminars on how to pee on a stick, how to interpret every single brand of home pregnancy test available on the market. Still, her heart skips and the promised five minutes stretch for hours and days. At first it used to feel like betrayal for her to take these tests alone, without Dave knowing, but three or four months into trying, she decided it was better this way, it was her way of protecting him from her failure. He always found out though, so there was that.

He won't know this time, Emily thinks. I'll make sure of it.

She also thinks, Maybe I should've bought an egg timer.

Eventually the five minutes are up and Emily musters all her courage to look at the test.

Two lines.

She doesn't even make it out of the store.

She wants to tell him in person, but her brain's spinning and her hands have a mind of their own. Somewhere in the middle of the aisle with the Clorox wipes and insect spray, she finds herself dialing his number. He answers on the second ring, and before he can even say hi, she says, "I'm pregnant."

He doesn't say anything, so she adds, "I also need to floss better."

He starts laughing this deep belly laugh that sounds like relief, and then she's laughing too, two people on an ordinary day in their ordinary lives.


End file.
